Quotes About Suburbia

The hell with reality! Let's have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let's all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality -- and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we'll all get busy and pretend it never happened.

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.

The sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room. A woman's only son came home insane, confronting her with God only knew what agonies of grief and guilt, and still she busied herself with the doings of the zoning board, with little chirrups of neighborly good cheer and cardboard boxes full of garden plants.

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.

Nobu Ishida had lived in an older split-level house on a Leave-It-to-Beaver street in Cheviot Hills, a couple of miles south of the Twentieth Century-Fox lot. It was dark, just after nine when we rolled past his home, rounded the block, and parked at the curb fifty yards up the street. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked.

But Stephanie hailed from suburban, midwestern nowhere, and there had been a club whose snack bar served thin, greasy burgers rather than salade niçoise with fresh seared tuna, like this one, but where tennis had been played on sun-cracked courts, and where Stephanie had achieved a certain greatness at around age thirteen. She hadn't played since.

There is currently more sprawl covering American soil than was ever intended by its inventors. While there are some people who truly enjoy living in this environment, there are many others who would prefer to walk to school, bicycle to work, or simply spend less time in the car.

Trophy hunters are not Everyman. These world-traveling endangered-species shooters are a far cry from the hunters who spend weekends in the American outback near their suburban or rural homes.

Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.

The mothers in my neighborhood were screamers and yellers, silent fuming carpet-raking speed cleaners or detached unkempt anticleaners, all-day-luncheon martini drinkers, chain smokers prostrate on the couch with bookcases filled with accounts of JFK and Camelot.

Mom lived in 709. Five doors down from 714, the number they stamped on Quaaludes.

My friends and I make great fun of the fact that I was labeled the so-called spokesperson for the generation. I don't think many writers write from that perspective. I'm sure John Updike doesn't sit around thinking, Boy, have I got the number on suburbia. He'd be horrified if he thought that was all he was up to.

Local teenagers killed in a car crash is a suburban legend, a stock plot line.

I started writing songs with my best friend Eden Rice when were in our early teens. We performed together at local coffee shops in suburban Atlanta as Kemp and Eden, until fate intervened and we were separated.

'Leave It to Beaver,' which ran from 1957 until 1963, was one of the strangest, sweetest, most distinctive domestic sitcoms of television's celebrated Golden Age.

The houses were squat and almost identical and each one had a square of grass in front of it like a dog gripping a stolen steak.

I was raised on Long Island. There were a lot of cops and firefighters who lived there.

Growing up in a suburban home, the world seems so massive to you. It seems like cities are so big and so far away, and there's so much in them. So your imagination runs wild, instead of when you are born in the middle of Manhattan, you'd know, like, that this is the biggest city.

We may never find a way to live in suburbia with deer as we do with raccoons, say, or squirrels. So for this reason, it's very important that we make sure always to save enough wild or open land so that they can live in their normal manner.

Growing up in Livingston, New Jersey, was terrific.

Suburbia, triumphant in the world's leading economy, also swept successfully through virtually every part of the advanced industrial world. Compared with the option of living closely packed in apartment complexes, most human beings seemed to define their personal "better city" as a little more space and privacy, and perhaps even a spot of lawn.

I'm really the candidate who has really lived his whole life in suburbia.

Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel.

I grew up in Plano, Texas.